Jennifer Horseman

by GnomeWonderland

  She shot startled eyes up to him, her expression neatly conveying her incredulity upon hearing those words. "What's over now? My beatings? So you say ... how strange, though! I feel no different. I fell trapped and helpless and held against my will in a place where what I want and what I feel does not matter—"

  "Enough," Garrett quickly rose to say, no longer trusting himself and willing to leave because of it. "I see little point in reiterating what's already been said. You have been hurt enough for one lifetime and as long as your desires can hurt you, I will keep you from him."

  He shut the door behind himself, stopping when he heard the book hit it. Her temper was indeed alarming, alarming in the sheer amount and force of desire it elicited, his desire to tame it. Aye, but a good sign nonetheless, even if she only expressed it behind closed doors. Like a clean fresh wind in the sails, anger was a necessary element on the long journey it would take for her to heal, and the toss of that book meant she was discovering she was safe again. . . .

  The last long arms of the sun slanted across the deck where Garrett stood. The great ship appeared vast, powerful, black against the endless blue desert of ocean. The darkening blue of the waters reminded him of her eyes darkening with passion, the uncharacteristically trite poetry of the thought telling him just how much she had captured of him. He found himself torn between laughing and cursing. A frustrated mixture of both sounded just as Leif came to stand by his side at the rail.

  As close friends do, Garrett soon found himself recounting the scene he had just quit, how he had found her hiding the book in fear he would object, how this affected him, and then his five-minute success in drawing her out. "I was shocked when I heard her thoughts on that book. Juliet is only ten and seven—"

  "Aye, I overheard something about that," Leif interrupted as he remembered something. "I was first to come across her and her young lad, and the devil if I did not hear him thankin' her for writing a treatise on your own Descartes. Her treatise, aye, but one the slovenly bastard presented at the university as his own." "Surely you jest?"

  "Nay, as the boy himself said, he has no mind for scholarly studies or ideas. But Garrett, I heard him say the paper she wrote won a place in the library."

  "The library?" Shock drew Garrett's brows together, and seeing it made Leif laugh.

  "Why is it men are always so shocked when a woman works with her mind."

  "That's not fair, Leif. I'd be shocked if she were a lad of seventeen. As if her beauty alone were not enough of an indictment—"

  "It never was enough for you, I've seen that a hundred times." Leif watched the emotion cross Garrett's face. "So what happened?"

  "My shock reminded her of another man, how it happened that he came to forbid her the use of his library, and as she was telling me this—" He shook his head and looked away. "Leif, I am in trouble. I want her so badly-"

  The gentle wind flapped the great sails overhead, small waves licked the side of the ship and from the main deck a sad song played on the oboe, all becoming the backdrop for Leifs solemn statement: "She has come at last, manifesting from the dream. Juliet is her form on earth." Garrett said nothing for a long time, having wondered about this himself. "All I saw of her in my dream was her hair, a long braid of burnt red hair falling over the rock where she lay, and I think ... I can't believe I didn't recognize it from the start. I didn't want to recognize her—there it is, a damning fact."

  "Ah, God's teeth, Garrett, you were crazed. You wouldn't have recognized your own image, yet alone a vision from a dream." He paused for a moment before whispering, "Garrett, why don't you just put her under a spell?"

  Now Garrett chuckled, "Ah, Leif, if only life were so simple. I thought of it that first night, but even then, I couldn't do that to her. Let me rephrase that: I won't do that to her." Yet a grin remained, a revelation of how much he might like to."

  "And why not?"

  "For any number of reasons. First, it would only last a day or two—"

  "And what a pleasant day or two."

  Save for the humor in his eyes, Garrett ignored this. "Jesus, she'd be utterly confused, not understanding at all what was happening to her. I'd wager she'd think she was dreaming or mad or both. Second, Leif, mesmerized or no, it would be against her will, and I don't want to do that to her again."

  Leif knew Garrett, though, knew Garrett made the world go his way. By force or magic, his will became reality. Garrett's expression told him he was contemplating not the measure but the result of it. "Garrett," he laughed, "it's like you say, you're the one caught in a spell."

  "Aye," he too laughed. "The inadvertent, irresistible spell of a young lady with the beauty of an angel, eyes made of poetry and rich, sable-colored hair that drops to her knees . . ."

  " Tis his grief," Leif said after the door closed behind Garrett.

  Juliet looked away, affected by it. After the unpleasant scene over books Garrett's grief overcame him tonight, as it had twice before. The sadness became manifest as they ate, changing the light in his eyes as he stared at her hand, his mind filling, she knew, with images of her uncle and his cruelty, traveling then to his younger brother's fate. He excused himself and left Leif and her alone, returning to his telescope where he found solace in tiny pinpoints of infinity lighting the night sky.

  Juliet touched her plate, pushing it away.

  "Aye, 'tis sad for those of us left on earth," Leif sighed. "Not a day passes when I didn't long for Megan, to hear her voice or touch her face. And it's been nearly ten years now."

  Leifs love still shone ten years after his wife's death.

  "What was she like? Your Megan?"

  "What was she like? Ah, well, she was a highland lass, as bonny and wild as the flowers that grow there. ... I fell in love the moment I saw her riding with her father. ... A McClelland, she was, the forsworn enemies of the Campbells for a century. Our marriage was arranged by our parents."

  "Like a truce?"

  "Aye, a truce. Though the reality was the McClellands needed our ships and we badly wanted their land. A good arrangement for all except Megan herself. Poor Megan, she was raised to hate me and hate me she did"

  A fine yarn spinner, Leif shared an amusing history of how he finally captured Megan's unwilling heart. "An honest-to-God taming of the shrew, only if Megan was here she would be tellin' you 'twas I who needed the tamin'."

  He talked for some time more and she listened, fascinated but confused. The more he talked, the more confused she became. How did this man with such soft sentiments—love, affection, humor, a man who could peer into a soul and see a life—become a pirate, a cutthroat, a man associated with Garrett?

  Leif fell silent, lost to his own memories until he looked up to realize he was the object of her study.

  "What's on your mind? You look like a question is spinnin' round there."

  "I ... we will be reaching Sardinia on the morrow?"

  "Aye."

  Sardinia was an English port in the Mediterranean, she knew. "There will be English ships there?" Leif tried to guess where this was going. "Aye." "Well, how is it a pirate ship will be welcome?" "They will not sight us. What are you gettin' at, lass?" "I ... I'm just trying to make sense of this. I don't understand how Garrett gets away with everything—" "You aren't alone there, but I wager you'll be wonderin' . . . what? If our ship will get caught or if you'll get a chance to — " He stopped, seeing fear change her face. "Ah, lass, you couldn't be thinkin' of trying to leave us or some such nonsense, now could you?" He shook his head, "Well, get the notion out of your head right now."

  "I can't ... I can't." She rose and presented her back to hide her emotions. "What if someone kept you separated from Megan, what would you do? How would you feel?"

  "A different story, lass, as you well know."

  "Why is it different? I love him ... I-"

  "You think you do. Just as Megan thought she hated me. Just as Mary, my youngest daughter, thought she loved this scoundrel, a man who courted her with flowe
rs and pretty poems but whose lust was only for her inheritance and my properties. There he was every night, gamblin' monies he did not have and fallin' down drunk in one of Dublin's houses, a louse all round. My oldest too: Catherine was only ten and four when I caught her sneaking out in the dark dead of night to elope with this peasant lad, a boy eking a miserable livin' out o' the township. Lord, that one could nary feed himself yet alone the children he'd get her with. Women do not have a mind for the choices of that kind; their heads are ruled by the heart. Like you, lass. The only reason you think you love that boy is because he—as pitiful as he was—he was all the comfort you had in those long days of terror."

  "That's not true!"

  "Ah," Leif stood up to leave, "you will come to see it, lass."

  That's just not true, she kept telling herself over and over again long after Leif left her alone. 'Tis just not true. She loved Tomas and always would, and that love had nothing to do with her . . . long days of terror. Nothing. She loved Tomas for the very reasons they condemned him: for his gentleness and kindness and tenderness.

  She had to write that letter tonight.

  Much later Garrett returned, stepping inside the light of quarters only to find Juliet sitting at his desk struggling to write that letter again. This time he did not trust himself to say anything beyond a short unacknowledged greeting. The soft light of the lantern shone over her. Loose wisps of hair framed her pale face, where shadows and light played. He noticed everything: the quickness of her breaths his presence brought her, the darker-colored brows over her lowered lashes as she, too, tried to pretend he wasn't there. An effort that made small creases of concentration on her brow.

  He imagined banishing those worried lines as he took her lips beneath his. Softer and sweeter than a child's dreams, he remembered her first shocked yielding to his kiss, the agony and confusion its pleasure brought her. Aye, but the only thing greater than his desire was his need to protect her, he kept having to remind himself. . . .

  To her relief, Garrett turned away suddenly. He moved to the bed where he began removing his boots. Tonali leaped to the place he slept on top of the bookshelves and the bed light was extinguished.

  The tension he brought her! She dropped the quill, breathing deeply and far too quickly, as if she had just run. She turned back to the letter, reread her own words and with a small agonized gasp she crumpled the paper and tossed it into the waste basket.

  She just couldn't do it! Every time she began to relate the events it seemed as if she was writing one of those dreadful penny novels: My History on Board the Famous Pirate Ship The Raven: Part One—"How my identity was mistaken for that of my evil cousin, and of my abduction and terror." Dear Lord, why, oh why, did this have to happen to her? Oh Tomas, what will you think of me? She put out the lamp and quietly moved to the hammock, her thoughts traveling in circles like a dog chasing its tail, until, as she lay down on the hammock, she asked herself again: what if all she said to Tomas was that 'twas a terrible mistake, and that once Garrett discovered his mistake, she had been safe and well? What if she never told him? Would he know when he married her?

  "Garrett?"

  The sound of his name in the darkness surprised him. "Yes? What, love?"

  "That night . . . How did you know I wasn't Clarissa? I mean . . . exactly?"

  How did he know she wasn't Clarissa?

  "What?" he questioned out loud, rising on an elbow to peer at her through the darkness. The soft whisper of her voice was filled with fear or trepidation, and he could not guess why until—

  "I mean . . . well, men don't always know, do they?"

  She might have easier asked straight out if Tomas would know she wasn't a virgin, though it took Garrett several long moments to believe it. Juliet didn't understand the silence until she heard a low hissing sound from the top bookshelf, Tonali warning her of the effect of her question before she heard his reply.

  "Listen carefully, love," he said in a voice tense with control, as he swung his long legs over the side of the bed, not trusting himself to move an inch more. "You will not mention him to me again. You will especially take care never to be so daft again as to put the picture in my mind of you in his bed. Because, love," he stood up, "you have just discovered one of the precious few things in this world that can incite me to violence."

  He moved to the door and left, slamming it behind him. Shocked by this, Juliet froze, her mind turning over a dozen times in the instant. How could he say that? As if he owned her, as if she belonged to him? After all he had done, with some absurd pretense of protecting her, somehow he had the idea that he owns her!

  The thought brought equal parts confusion, fear, and anger in a potent and maddening mix, and it took over an hour before she finally saw she had no hope but to escape. That night escape became imperative; somehow she had to do it. Without means or money, she would risk her life to escape him and find her way back to Tomas. No one, not even Garrett, could keep her separated from him . . . and she would show him that.

  A commotion sounded on deck, rousing her. Juliet opened her eyes to see the light of a midday sun. She looked around the quiet empty room, wondering if he had returned at all in the night, then wondering why she cared. She hurriedly went about bathing. Her hands trembled with an effort to control her emotions, emotions raw and confused and so sorely tried. "I won't let you do this to me Garrett. ... I won't."

  The conviction sang in her mind all day, even as later that afternoon she carefully folded the crisp white pages of the letter. She took the small stick of wax, lit it with a candle flame and let the bright red wax drip into Gar-rett's seal just as Gayle entered with tea. The young man made a brief study of her before setting the tray down at the table. "You're done, I see."

  Juliet made no comment, ignoring him still. She had not spoken a word all day, at least to him, which was a good deal less than had Garrett. Garrett had his tempers, but they normally passed like the gusts of a clean strong wind. Normally Garrett forgave offenses and misadventures easily, weighing the circumstances and the great blanket of human frailty. It was also true that, more than almost anyone else, Garrett remained maddeningly unconcerned about things he could not change, wind and weather and all acts of the almighty hand of fate. Not today. As the ship slowly approached the rendezvous point, an unnamed, uninhabited isle off Sardinia, Garrett snapped orders as if the ship were sailing into battle, blasting the men for every small mishap on deck, carrying on for nearly a half hour over the rigging of the sails beneath the nearly dead wind.

  Gayle had no idea what had happened behind these closed doors, but something had, a very unpleasant something. "Anything else, Juliet?"

  The letter was finished now but the effort had cost her much. It hurt, it hurt so badly, she felt ... she felt mad with it, as if she was losing her sanity beneath Garrett's hold on her and her helplessness to do anything about it . . . helpless until she found a chance to escape, and how long would that be?

  The idea brought a sudden fear. "Wait," she stopped him with a whisper at the door. He turned back around, arms folded impatiently at his chest. "Gayle .... Gar-rett truly intends to send my letter to Tomas? He wasn't just saying so?"

  "Look, about your young man, if it were up to me—" Booted steps sounded outside, stopping Gayle midsen-tence. Leif followed Garrett inside, stopping their conversation, too, as they overheard this last. As always, the room shrank dramatically with the sheer masculine presence of the two men. Garrett looked a sight in his sun-washed white breeches, white cotton vest, and thick black belt. He wore nothing else, standing bootless, his long hair falling loose to his shoulders. The tension was tangible, and yet save for the cruel amusement in his eyes, Garrett ignored Juliet as he crossed the space to the cupboards that contained the maps in back.

  Unlike Garrett, Leif did not ignore them. He examined the two younger people as he combed his neat red beard with one hand, the other hand on his hip. With his own long hair pulled to a tight braid in back, he wore finely tailo
red brown breeches, moccasin boots, and a white silk shirt open nearly to the waist. He too looked every bit as frightening as the first time she had seen him, for an inexplicable anger shone in his eyes as he demanded of Gayle, "Yes, Gayle? Tell Juliet what my son would do to her young man if it were up to him?"

  Juliet tensed as Gayle looked crossly at his father, undaunted, though obviously reluctant to obey. Despite the potion and the blow to Tomas, Gayle treated her only with kindness and unmasked sympathy, sympathy she assumed rose from Garrett's mistreatment of her. She waited to hear him speak in her defense, certain he would.

  "What good would it do?" he questioned.

  Leif s gaze narrowed a fraction and he said simply: "It would show her that Garrett is far more merciful than most men."

  Emotions shimmered in her eyes as she waited for Gayle to deny this last. Gayle leveled his gaze at her, hating to hurt her anymore but supposing his father was right. "He's right, Juliet. After seeing your marks, I would have shot him."

  The surprising blow felt like a blade through her heart. She stared for a long moment as her eyes filled with outrage, indignation, and finally fury. She swung around, unwilling to dignify a word of the exchange with a single word of her own. The tension built in the silence until Garrett sounded a series of orders to Gayle. "Have Pots bring up the best wines and cognacs. Get, ah, Craig or Michael in the mast and make sure I hear when the longshore boat's sighted. When it is, come to escort Juliet out. I don't want a single pair of eyes to fall on her. And oh, tell Heart he can start rotating those who want to fish in groups of five. And no goddamn exceptions to the rules this time."

  Gayle left with a solemn "Aye aye, sir," and Leif turned to where Garrett had arranged maps on the table. A heated debate followed concerning the risk involved in Algiers, nothing she could understand, even if she could manage to hear a word over the fury pounding her temples, a fury fueling the unnatural pace of her heart and pulse. She paced back and forth until she finally flung herself on the bed.